Newport News

The “narcissism of small
differences” began life as a description of the uniquely tedious
brand of sectarian infighting that afflicts the intellectual left.
Clearly, though, the concept applies with at least equal force to
the higher empyrean of our economic order. Consider the recent
New York Times Home and Garden dispatch on the lavish
Newport spread of Richard Saul Wurman, the high-concept impresario
behind the TED (technology, education, design) conference, and his
novelist wife, Gloria Nagy. The culture-making pair has been holed
up in their 13-bedroom mansion for the past 17 years, but as
Times overclass-warren correspondent Penelope
Green notes, they fancy themselves to be “in Newport, but not
of it.”

Sure, it’s a 19th century copy of a French country estate-a
“super mansion,” as Green dubs it, replete with its own historic
estate name, “the Orchard,” presumably in partial reference to the
verdant eight-acre spread in back. Sure, a pair of Lexuses, one
white, one black, are parked in the circular drive out front with
the ur-preppy vanity plates “Momsie” and Popsie.” Sure, Nagy once
happened upon a smartly dressed middle aged woman and her daughter
waiting in the front hall under the mistaken impression that they
were awaiting an admissions interview at the Salve Regina
University across the street.

But when Wurman hails her into the cavernous interior with the
disarming greeting, “Isn’t it pretentious?” Green immediately takes
the bait. Wurman may be grinning at his own excess, she writes, but
“the joke’s not on him. It’s on his adopted city, its name still
associated with the last vestiges of high WASP society.”

And how does that joke work, exactly? As Wurman’s designer
confrere Massimo Vignelli explains things, the fusty smart set in
Newport “need each other. They need their booze at 5, their costume
parties. They need to know who is who, and who married what and how
much money. It’s a kind of zoo. In that zoo, of course, Ricky has
his own private pavilion, and he never goes out. I think he is
considered an alien.”

In reality, of course, American prophets of social mobility have
been marveling at the decay of the WASP establishment practically
from the moment it first arrived on the Mayflower, not too far from
the stately spreads of Newport. So it’s a safe bet that many
diehard fixtures of the Newport scene, from to Caroline Astor to
Claus von BÃ¼low, haven’t imagined themselves born to those
particular manors, either. Long before it became the province of
hipsters and (what amounts to the same thing)
TV writers, social irony was a diverting plaything of the
members of the power elite-and they relished nothing more than the
chance to deploy it on
their own social backgrounds.

So Wurman’s potshots at the squares in the neighboring mansions
come off chiefly as the fine-grained invidious distinction that
privileged souls have always used to mark themselves off as proper
star-bellied Sneetches. The Rhode Island swells around him are
“humorless,” he sniffs, trapped in “an intellectual wasteland.”
Why, he confides to Green, “if you asked me to tell you when I last
had lunch with anybody but my wife or someone that came to see me
from India or New York or Boston or Germany, I couldn’t come up
with a name.”

Indeed, as Green notes, one of the perks of establishing
the TED
series-basically a version of the Burning Man festival for the
self-regarding global info-elite, save that admission at Burning
Man won’t set
you back a cool $6,000-is that you get to hold court among
way-new boldfaced names in your 11-fireplace old-money sanctum.
During the lunch hours in a recent week, she writes, “a member of
the Clinton Foundation came to visit, as did a rear admiral, the
dean of a design college, a digital entrepreneur, a German urban
planner working in Bangalore and Martha Stewart, who phoned as she
was driving through town (Mr. Wurman wasn’t home). â€˜I’ve had
better lineups,’ he said later.”

You hear that, Newport? Even as powerful an avatar of the good
life as Martha Stewart isn’t enough to fill out Wurman’s idea of a
decent week’s lunch card. And this is all to say nothing, of
course, of the “appealingly eclectic” interior trappings that the
couple brought with them from previous tours in L.A. (where they
met) and Manhattan. There’s the player-grand piano banging out
Baroque chestnuts; there are the Jim Dine, David Hockney and Dale
Chihuly artworks. Outside, there’s a modified French formal garden,
which Wurman, in a nod to his past career as an architect, has
festooned with “contiguous landscapes of circles: there are roses
planted in a spiral; a labyrinth of stones; a whorl of Indian
columns; a pool shaped like a semicircle. He has collected giant
iron submarine buoys that look like planets or land mines and
deployed them about the place.” Well, decorative eccentricity, too,
has long been a WASP
calling card, after all.

And of course, there’s a corps of four fulltime employees to
keep the whole grand works functioning and maintained, “including a
house manager and the couple’s personal assistant.” And there’s
that most treasured elite possession of all: the grown kids that
Wurman and Nagy have raised, both from respective earlier marriages
and their own union. Tony Wurman is a glass-blower and artist; his
brother Joshua, “a severe-weather chaser”; son Reven, a New York
photographer; and their daughter Vanessa, who “has developed an
equestrian center in Charlestown, R.I.”

These are the very kinds of edifying pursuit, in other words,
that any other scion of Newport would train their handsome family
legacies and classbound upbringings on. In other words, it turns
out that the big joke of the Wurman-Nagy Newport alliance isn’t on
the couple themselves, or the self-involved WASP elite surrounding
them, but rather on the rest of us. As I’m sure the young
Wurman-Nagys learned in some boarding school or another, plus ca
change, plus c’est la meme chose.